rethinking Reading

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LipiomK îj

Claus Emmeche Kalevi Kull

Frederik Stjernfelt

Reading Hoffmeyer, rethinking biology

TARTU SEMIOTICS LIBRARY 3

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Tartu Semiotics Library 3

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Tartu Semiootika Raamatukogu 3 Тартуская библиотека семиотики 3

Tartu semiotik biblioteket 3

Hoffmeyerit lugedes, bioloogiat ümber sõnastades Читая Хоффмейера, переосмысливая биологию

Laes Hoffmeyer — nytaenk biologien

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University of Tartu

Reading Hoffmeyer, rethinking biology

Claus Emmeche Kalevi Kull Frederik Stjernfelt

Tartu 2002

TARTU UNIVERSITY

PRESS

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Series editor: Peeter Torop Assistant editor: Silvi Salupere

Address of the editorial office:

Department of Semiotics University of Tartu Tiigi St. 78

Tartu 50410, Estonia e-mail: semiotics@ut.ee

This publication has been supported by Novozymes, Denmark Cover drawings by Aleksei Turovski

ISBN 9985-56-632-7 Tartu University Press

Tiigi 78, Tartu 50410, Estonia Order No. 61

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INTRODUCTION Entering a semiotic landscape

¹

In the past decade, biosemiotics has become visible in the realm of natural science and philosophy as an emerging network of ideas, concepts and hypothesis of what constitutes life — involving bio logists, semioticians, philosophers and others. Biosemiotics could be seen as a biological paradigm in some sense. "Rather than understanding biology as a separate layer 'between' physics and semiotics, we should then see biology as a science of the interface in which these two sciences meets, an interface in which we study the origin and evolution of sign processes, semiosis".2 Biosemio

tics provides a theoretical framework for understanding living systems very differently from the metaphysical idea that cells and organisms are simply organized organic molecules. We think this is an obvious way to introduce the essence of this approach, simultaneously with an introduction to a biochemist, biologist, and semiotician, Jesper Hoffmeyer — as the very concept of bio semiotics has become so deeply associated with his work.

It seems that often the articles most cited are not the best, that the authors whose names are well-known are not those who formulated the ideas attributed to them, and that scientists about whom biographies are written are not necessarily deserving. One method to avoid this — the method which we would like to recom mend to everybody — is to reread thoroughly what has been written by a colleague or friend. As we will argue below, reading Hoffmeyer provides a profound set of tools for thought to re-

1 Cf. Hoffmeyer 2001c: 387.

2 Hoffmeyer 1997c: 363.

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8 Introduction: Entering a semiotic landscape

evaluate biology as we know it, to reorganize data and empirical findings in a new architecture, that is, to envision a way to under

stand the evolution of micro-organisms, plants and animals on Earth which does not make it a mystery how the human mind could develop within the physical Universe. According to this view, life, signs, cognition, and interpretation are tightly interconnected, and thus biology (the science of life) and semiotics (the science of signs, their action and interpretation) may not only offer much to one another, but may even belong to one and the same ontological domain.

Biologists understandably look for theory. If they feel under

standing life requires mathematics, they will take full courses in it, from algebra to chaos theory; if they conclude that physics explains life, they can study its relevant aspects; if it is chemistry, they go to a lab. The history of biology proves that some have learned such theories so well that they became professionals in both fields. A source may also be philosophy, or linguistics, which will create a new field of theoretical biology. Biology has seen this as an understandable result of its hunger for theory to underpin, orga

nize, and synthesize — and finally to understand — the vast and diverse amount of phenomena it has discovered. Finally, to the extent that some have reached the conclusion that biology is impossible without fundamentals of semiotics, some biologists have decided to do semiotics on a professional basis — or perhaps it is the other way round. More and more biologists are beginning to understand that the essence of life is to mean something, to mediate significance, to interpret signs. This already seems to be, so to speak, unconsciously present even in orthodox Neo-Darwi- nism and its recurrent use of terms like "code", "messenger",

"genetic information", and so on. These concepts hide the final causes Darwinists believed to have discarded 150 years ago, because such concepts allow the researching biologist to look only at that selected train of processes that lead to an organic goal (sorry, to what a gene "codes for"), while many other possible effective causes (one molecule bumping into another without coding and producing nothing but heat) may be discretely left aside. This secret language, where "code" seems to be a code for

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final cause, points to the fact that it might be more honest and productive to attack the problem head-on and to formulate an explicit biological theory taking these recurrent semiotics meta phors at face value and discussing them as real scientific problems.

This means that a principal task of biology will be to study signs and sign processes in living systems. This is biosemiotics — the scientific study of biosemiosis. Semiotics, the general science of signs, thus becomes a reservoir of concepts and principles when it is recognized that biology, being about living systems, at the same time is about sign systems. Moreover, semiotics will probably not remain the same after this encounter with biology: both sciences will be transformed fundamentally while gradually being melded into one more comprehensive field.

There are probably rather many scholars and students in the world who came across the term 'biosemiotics' for the veiy first time while listening to a talk given by Jesper Hoffmeyer, or reading parts of his work, or finding oneself at his homepage. In the last decade Hoffmeyer's publications in English have all re

volved around different aspects of the same field of which he is a founder.

Jakob von Uexkiill, a master of biosemiotics, did not use the word 'semiotics'. Those who wrote on 'biosemiotics' in 1960s and 70s (e.g., Rothschild 1962, Stepanov 1971, Florkin 1974)¹were read by few. Thomas A. Sebeok, the great promoter, organizer, coordinator and author of many publications in the field, became acknowledged by his works in zoosemiotics, the study of animal communication (e.g., Sebeok 1972, 1990). Sebeok, a semiotician at large, and Thure von Uexkiill, a leader of European psychosomatic medicine, had created in their interaction and dialogue a basic niche where biosemiotics itself started to be formed.4 This was supported by a major shift in the views on the scope of semiotics.'

The line of thinking was also prepared, of course, by those who did not use this term but meant more-or-less the same thing (e.g., Thom. Pattee, Goodwin).

4 On a history of biosemiotics, see Sebeok 1998, 2001. Kull 1999.

A programmatic article by 6 leading scholars in semiotics (Anderson et al. 1984) paved the way. This paper introduced a series of concepts from evolutionary biology;

however, while speaking about zoo- and endosemiotics, it still — paradoxically — avoided using the term 'biosemiotics'.

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10 Introduction: Entering a semiotic landscape

However, a generation of professional biologists had to appear who could embrace their contributions and apply their insights in a modern context in order to generate a field of knowledge, or even a whole new paradigm for biology and a biologically informed foundation for semiotics. This generation is still living.

That Jesper Hoffmeyer was born five dozens years ago in Denmark may have some significance. There may be a culture that has, for peculiar reasons, provided the conditions for influential paradigm-makers in many fields. Whether this is due to geo graphical placement — between the holism of Germany and ratio nalism of northern Scandinavia, on a seaway between empirical Britannia and the ontological Baltic — or due to a need for nature in a land overfilled by culture; whether this may be explained by subterranean force fields emanating from scholars like 0rsted, Bohr, Jerne and Hjelmslev, it is a fact that both philosophy of nature and semiotics had experienced one of its highest points. The Danish semiotics is among the world's most eminent, and even Danish biologists cannot entirely ignore its development.

Timing is also important, because, as stated in a book about Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life, "truly, the final decades of the century could be called an 'epoch of signs'".⁶That this has to do with large-scale historical and technological transformations of human societies has, as we shall see, also been investigated by Hoffmeyer.

Jesper Hoffmeyer has written many if not most of his texts on biology and biosemiotics in his mother tongue. His sixth book — Signs of Meaning in the Universe — was the first translated into English, and it became a must for everybody who wants to write on the semiotics of life. Many Danish sources that are mentioned in this book spread the flavor of this culture to every pupil in the field (as nicely mentioned by Chebanov 1998). An entire special issue of Semiotica (vol. 120, 3/4) was devoted to international reviews of Signs of Meaning, a very rare event for the leading journal of semiotics.

6 Petrilli, Ponzio 2001: 3.

7 Hoffmeyer D 1993a, 1996a.

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In what follows, we will first describe a few core elements of Jesper Hoffmeyer's understanding of biosemiotics. These elements will be presented in the form of 13 theses, extracted and identified through the rereading of his works written since the mid-80s. We believe that these theses may include the crucial cornerstones of a biological paradigm that biologists are only now acknowledging.

This chapter is concluded by a brief draft glossary of biosemiotic terms. A short text by Hoffmeyer himself follows; an essay from his Danish collection. A more personal part supplements this essay— through the subjective eyes of the colleagues. Finally, as it may soon become too troublesome to assemble the titles of all of Hoffmeyer's work, we furnish a list of his works now. Hopefully, this will be helpful for anybody who wants to read a piece of good biology and to think about life's meaningfulness.

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A BIOSEMIOTIC BUILDING: 13 THESES

In his paper on the concept of the swarming body, Hoffmeyer formulates 8 statements which sum up his position (Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940). He calls these statements theses, and despite half of them deal with swarms (the topic of that paper), these begin with the basic units of life in thesis 1, and end up with the phenomenon of thoughts and feelings in thesis 8. Thus, it is an attempt to give a very brief formulation of the whole approach, if not a paradigm.

Another version of the same paper, which was published earlier (Hoffmeyer 1995a) but probably written later than the one mentioned above, proposes 9 theses. This is, of course, neither the first⁸ nor the last⁹ attempt to formulate a semiotic view on living systems in the form of a list of brief statements. However, they provide a good starting point for any further list of biosemiotic principles. Therefore, we are going to use them here, sometimes modifying and splitting or mixing with the formulations from (mainly Hoffmeyer's) other writings.

Thus, we go on with re-reading, which is interpreting. We are going to (re)read and (re)write, to (re)cognise and (re)present again the principles of a semiotic view on life. In doing so, we try to distillate the key ideas from a continuous body of texts, though both are needed for real knowledge (as the principle 2 below says).

What follows are the main theses of biosemiotics as extracted from Jesper Hoffmeyer's writings. Each thesis in the form of brief statement is supplied by few illustrative quotations and comments.

8 For instance, 'three laws' of biosemiotics have been formulated already 40 years ago (Rothschild 1962; see also Kull 1999b).

9 Biosemiotics in 22 statements by Stjernfelt (2002) has been formulated almost simultaneously with this text here.

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14 A biosemiotic building: 13 theses

1. Signs, not molecules, are the basic units in the study of life.¹⁰

By representing an organism merely as a composition of small non-living bodies that interact according to the mechanical forces, or quantum mechanical laws, as established in physics, we may never reach the description of life itself that will correspond to a biologist's intuition about its nature, including concepts like orga

nism, metabolism, ecosystem, reproduction, etc., as these have been understood in a tradition of biological culture. However, if we try to include into a model of an elementary living process all what is required for the process to be a model of life, it appears that the set of features we arrive at will include the features that charac

terise a sign, or a sign process. That is, in order to have a set of physical processes to be characterized as living, these have to be realized, partly or fully, through the mediation of signs; 'signs', of course, in a specific sense, as we are taking about a very general notion of signs,11 more encompassing than just 'conventional sym

bols'. And it follows that "if signs (rather than molecules) are taken as fundamental units for the study of life, biology becomes a semiotic discipline".1- This semiotic understanding is also achieved if we include into the features of this model the model-building itself, because models are not the sum of their building blocks but are defined by being about something else; they are complex signs occurring in organisms: "The understanding that biology models the activity of model-building organisms is at the core of biose

miotics, of course".1 Thus, the statement about the basic units not only concerns the method of study, it also concerns ontology. The element of life is the sign, not the molecule.

But is DNA, to mention a crucial example, not a molecule?

Sure it is, but more than that: this molecule is only interesting (i.e., meaningful) in its biological context, because specific parts of it

10 Thesis 1, in Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940, and 1995a: 23.

11 This general concept of signs as relational processes of a certain kind goes back to the American scientist, philosopher and semiotician C. S. Peirce (1839-1914).

12 Hoffmeyer 1995a: 16.

Hoffmeyer 1999b: 156.

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act, within the cell, as specific signs in the metabolism. One may, of course, model DNA purely in chemical terms, but to be biologi

cally significant (for instance, in order to locate genes on a DNA sequence), the chemical findings have to be related to what is significant for a cell or an organism. Thus, it must be significant in two related senses of the word: it must be significant in relation to the biological process in question, and, by virtue of this, it becomes significant for the biologist as a fact of biology.

2. Codes of living beings are dual.

Signs mean messages mean information. Biological information, however, is not a simple issue. "Organisms recognise and interact with each other as analog codes in ecological space, while they (after recombination through meiosis and fertilization in sexually reproducing species) are carried passively forward in time between generations as digital codes".14 Life (and also "self') does not exist until both — the analogue and digital, or cytoplasm and nucleic acid— are present:¹⁵ "This principle of code-duality in fact can be taken as a definition of life"."¹Thus, this principle can be used to tell life from life-like devices like computers or their software: "This critérium would exclude computers since these have not (at least yet) been constructed to depend on the creative activity of an analogly coded version interacting with real world processes in such a way as to test the fitness of the digital specifications necessary for its own construction".¹⁷Code duality means an inevitable interplay of self- description and other-description, of genetic and ecologic, of vertical and horizontal, of diachronic and synchronic aspects of the living.

"Symbolically this code-duality may be represented through the relation between the egg and the hen".18

1,1 Hoffmeyer 1995a: 17.

18 Hoffmeyer, Emmeche 1991: 126. The principle of code duality — formulated already in Hoffmeyer 1987 and sketched in his Danish introduction to philosophy of biology (Hoffmeyer D 1984a) — was inspired by works of G. Bateson (1979) and

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Code duality is a principle that recognizes the importance of biological self-reference in life processes. Accordingly, "the chain of events which sets life apart from non-life, i.e. the unending chain of responses to selected differences, thus needs at least two codes: one code for action (behaviour) and one code for me

mory — the first of these codes necessarily must be analog, and the second very probably must be digital".¹'

3. The simplest entity to possess real semiotic competence is the cell.²⁰

To support this statement, arguments similar to those used for proving the statement that a cell is a minimal living system may be used. However, from the semiotical point of view, a cell is a minimal unit in which the inside-outside distinction appears due to the closed membrane that surrounds cytoplasm. "A spheric surface defines an inside-outside asymmetry and opens the possibility for communicative activity across the membrane".^-1This automatically brings in a whole set of semiotic phenomena, due to the boundary as a semiotically selective and creative mechanism. Also, the analog- digital duality appears in the cell, because it is a self-referential system based on redescription in the digital code of its nucleic acid chains. "It is easy to forget how enormously complicated a cell is". ^- An eukaryotic cell, of course, is already a compound cell which includes membranes and organelles that are also cells.

The semiotic quality of life is grounded the organization of the cell's metabolism. For a biochemist the world consists of mole cular shapes. Biological sign activity is based on the recognition

A. Wilden (1980) (and partly by Pattee). It presupposes a concept of information which is not objective in the sense of mathematical information theory (cf. Emmeche 1990, a dissertation written in 1985-1989 on the concept of information in biology). On similar and independent formulations of the same principle by other authors see Hoffmeyer 1995a: 24n2. 2000b. 2001a, and a remark in Kull 1998: 303.

Hoffmeyer. Emmeche 1991: 127.

Thesis 2. in Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940, and 1995a: 23.

" Hoffmeyer 1992: 104.

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capabilities of macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids.

And molecular shapes play a crucial role in these recognition pro cesses. The biochemist's world of shapes does not easily mingle with the computer scientist's simpler world of switches. Infor

mation and sign activity at the sub-cellular level is not abstract and therefore it poses no symbol grounding problem as information in a computer."³ Biosemiotic signs are inherently meaningful due to their direct involvement in the processes they signify.

4. Living systems consist of surfaces inside surfaces which turns inside exterior and outside interior.24

The importance of boundaries as semiotically active objects has been repeatedly pointed out by semioticians of culture, but this equally applies to biological systems: "Life is a surface activity.

[...] Life is fundamentally about insides and outsides".2' Most crucial events in macroevolution as well as in individual morpho

genesis are related to new contacts between the surfaces of cells and tissues. An example of this is the origin of eukaryotic cell.

Surfaces turn into interfaces linking the interior and exterior. "Only then does the system's understanding of its environment matter to the system [...]: relevant parts of the environment becomes inter

nalised as an 'inside exterior', a phenomenal world or perceptual model which was called the umwelt by von Uexkiill, and in the same time the interior becomes externalised as an 'outside interior' in the form of'the semiotic niche'".26

This double twist of inside and outside are made possible by the membrane strictly governing the traffic between them and thus making primitive intentionality possible: "The semiotic looping of organism and environment into each other through the activity of their interface, the closed membrane, also lies at the root of the

23 Hoffmeyer J1997. This aspect has been developed further by Stjernfelt 1992.

24 Hoffmeyer 1998a: 33, 40.

ъ Hoffmeyer 2000a.

2 6 Hoffmeyer 1998a: 40.

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strange future-directedness or 'intentionality' of life, its 'striving' towards growth and multiplication".²⁷

5. Subjectness is a more-or-less phenomenon.²⁸

This implies the inclusion of a controlled notion of "subject" in biology: the "conception of subjectivity — which was developed in an entirely human context — corresponds surprisingly well to the [...] criterion distinguishing living systems from non-living systems:

the capacity for selective (i.e., active) incorporation of the present into the future".²⁹ Accordingly, "subjectness has its own natural history", ¹¹ co-extensive with the natural history of signification.¹' Thus, there is a general semiotic continuity in evolution, which, on the other hand, gives rise to the emergence of new forms and new code systems (such as animal thought and communication, or human

language, the other grand code-dual system in evolution).

6. Subjectivity is embodied.

Intentionality, subjectivity, and self-awareness (which are not one and the same thing and whose finer interrelations still remain to be clarified) are not phenomena forever beyond the horizon of science;

rather, "the key to a scientific understanding of the mental is embodied existence and not the fictitious idea of disembodied symbolic organization"¹²as, e.g., in classical artificial intelligence.

The intentionality of human mental life has evolved from something related in evolution; it has been "present as a germ in our most

28 Thesis 3, in Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940, and 1995a: 23. A whole section on this in Hoffmeyer 1992: 102-107.

29 Hoffmeyer 1992: 103. Hoffmeyer refers here to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

30 Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940.

31 The Danish subtitle of Hoffmeyer's 1996a book (D1993a) means "The natural history of signification".

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related animals".'³ Furthermore, the unity of consciousness in humans is "a function of the body's own historical oneness",³⁴"the body is effecting an interpretation of its situation vis-à-vis the biographically rooted narrative which the individual sees him- or herself as being involved in at that moment. This interpretation is what we experience as consciousness".13 Consciousness is the body's spatial and narrative interpretation of its existential umwelt/6

7. Living body is a swarm.

The unsolved question of multicellular organisms may be ap

proached through the concept of swarm; it is "a set of (mobile) agents which are liable to communicate directly or indirectly (by acting on their local environment) with each other, and which collectively carry out a distributed problem solving".'⁷ From this point of view, there is a fertile analogy between social animal groups and multicellular organisms, so that the latter constitute governed hierarchies of swarms: "Vertebrate bodies are supposed to function on the basis of swarm dynamic principles not unlike those pertaining to social insects. The swarm of cells constituting a human body should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of overlapping swarms of very different kinds. The minor swarms again are swarm-entities, so that we get a hierarchy of swarms. An image arises in which the brain is functionally integrated into the body. Swarms of immune cells interact with swarms of nerve cells in maintaining the somatic ecology.

Thoughts and feelings are not localised entities. They swarm out of our body collective".38 This also provides a crucial point in an explantion of how mind is embodied.³⁹

36 Hoffmeyer 1996a: 122. See also the essay on proprioception by Hoffmeyer (below).

39 Hoffmeyer 1995c.

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8. Whatever an organism senses also means something to it.⁴⁰

Hoffmeyer assigns⁴¹this statement to Uexkiill (1982: 31): "Every action, therefore, that consists of perception and operation imprints its meaning on the meaningless object and thereby makes it into a subject-related meaning-carrier in the respective umwelt (subjec tive universe)". This is the case even for a bacterium.4-

9. Wherever a new habit appears, it tends to become a sign for somebody.⁴³

Almost everything new that appears in an ecosystem will, earlier or later, be found, recognised, and used by some organism. This consti

tutes a basic reason why it is possible for the ecosystems to stay in ba

lance, even when new substances (that could earlier never been oc

curring in the history of Universe) are produced or new relationships established. Hoffmeyer (1997a) formulates it like this: "Whenever there has developed a habit there will also exist an organism for whom

+ l Hoffmeyer 1997a.

41 In Hoffmeyer 1997a.

4~ This example is from the English draft version of the Japanese paper Hoffmeyer J1997. "We can use the remarkably sophisticated chemotactic behaviour of the bacterium Escherichia coli for illustration. Coli bacteria have been shown to move in the direction which offers more nutrient molecules rather than less. They do this by measuring the saturation of their chemoreceptor-sites while they move. The swimming speed of a bacterium is 10 to 20 bodylenghts per second and by comparing current chemoreceptor occupancy with that during the previous few seconds, the cell is able to make measure

ments over distances of many body lengths. The task performed here is not only that of comparing measurements over time but also that of communicating the weighted result of this measurement to the flagellar motors who are actually doing the co-ordinated job of moving a cell along its path. [...] The information-processing involved in the simple act of moving appropriately in a nutrient gradient has evolved to satisfy the bacterium's survival-project. In this sense — and only in this sense — does it mean something to the bacterium. 'Meaning' here consists in the establishment of an informational loop between the bacterium and its environment. The bacterium of course is connected to the environ

ment by dozens of other loops and the totality of these loops forms what the German biologist Jakob von Uexkiill has called the umwelt of the bacterium (Uexkiill 1982)".

4"' Thesis 4, in Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940, and 1995a: 23.

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this habit has become a sign". He calls it a rule, and indeed this can be seen as a version of a general law of nature's tendency to take habits formulated in a quite similar way by Peirce. Whether it is a rule in the sense of necessity or a tendency in the sense of probability remains to be determined. In any case, this is a principle of semiogenesis that makes everything tendentially interconnected in an ecosystem, and, in a larger perspective, in the biosphere. "Living systems exhibit extreme semiogenic behaviour based on the semiotic dynamics of semetic interactions,⁴⁴whereby habits come to signify the release of further habits in an infinitely long and complex web stretching back to the beginning of life and forward to the global semiosphere of tomorrow".⁴⁵

10. The totality of 'contrapuntal duets'⁴⁶forms

the sphere of communication — the semiosphere.⁴⁷ If the biosphere is understood only as a global network or cycle of chemical elements through the organisms, then its character will only be really appreciated as an aspect of the more comprehensive notion of semiosphere: "from a biosemiotic point of view the biosphere appears as a reductionist category which will have to be understood in the light of the yet more comprehensive category of the semiosphere".⁴⁸However, if the biosphere is understood as a communicative web, then it leads to a claim formulated by T.

Sebeok (2001: 164): "Biosemiotics presupposes the axiomatic identity of the semiosphere with the biosphere".

Semiosphere is thus the totality of interconnected signs, a sphere that covers the Earth. The semiosphere is also a precondi tion for the functioning and development of semiotic systems, in-

44 The term 'semetic' has been criticised by Nöth (2001: 159) from the point of view of its etymology.

4:1 Hoffmeyer 1997b: 940.

46 Uexkiill 1982: 54.

47 Hoffmeyer 1997a.

4X Hoffmeyer 1997a: 934.

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eluding the creation of such sophisticated semiotic systems as thoughts and language.⁴⁹

11. The semiotic niche is the species' home.

A semiotic niche is the biosemiotic elaboration of the notion of

"ecological niche": it is "the diffuse segment of the semiosphere which the lineage has learned to master in order to control organismal survival in the semiosphere".'⁰ The population of a semiotic niche must possess certain specific semiotic abilities with regard to that niche: "The semiosphere imposes limitations on the umwelt of its resident population in the sense that, to hold its own in the semiosphere, a population must occupy a 'semiotic niche'.

To put it another way, it has to master a set of signs, of a visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile, and chemical nature, by means of which it can control its survival in the semiosphere".³¹Thus, umwelt and semiotic niche are two different perspectives on the same phenomenon: "The character of the animal's umwelt is what defines the spectrum of positions that an animal can occupy in the bio-logical sphere, its semiotic niche"."²

12. In living systems, determinacy is built upon indeterminacy.⁵³

Instead of a world that is one uniform material collection of particles by mechanical links, the reality of sign action leads us to perceive the world as an unruly mess of processes, each with some agential character or direction. At the bottom of this world one finds nothing like solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable

49 Hoffmeyer 1997b: 939. It should be added here that Hoffmeyer deliberately changes and extends the meaning of Lotman's "semiosphere" concept from the semiotics of culture, originally referring to the space extended by a culture.

Hoffmeyer 1998a: 40.

M Hoffmeyer 1996a: 59.

^ Hoffmeyer 1996a: 140.

Hoffmeyer 2000a.

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particles as in the Newtonian picture; on the contrary, one finds a certain amount of indeterminacy and spontaneity. This indeter minacy is connected to how order is created in biosphere (which is the same as in semiosphere) — via categorization which cate gorizes materially different phenomena in one and the same category and which thus, so to speak, gives up total determination in order to distinguish. Hoffmeyer extends it even further — to any habit-taking whatsoever.³⁴ Organisms indeterminate in some respects possess expandable or "open" boundaries that enable them to continue to grow and alter their patterns indefinitely. In sym biosis between different species, the processes of boundary-fusion, boundary-sealing, and boundary-redistribution lead to more persistent organizations in which individuality may be blurred.

Traditional symbiosis is just one particular kind of a much more widespread eco-semiotic integration. Individuality and mortality can be only loosely connected, and dynamic boundaries in space and time are not defined by their genetic set-up. The evolution of boundaries and the evolution of the contexts in which they put themselves are assisted by, not caused by, genetic inventions.55

13. Biological evolution is a trend toward increased semiotic freedom.⁵⁶

Our universe has a built-in tendency (not conflicting with the laws of thermodynamics) to produce organized systems possessing increasingly more semiotic freedom in the sense that the semiotic aspect of the system's activity becomes more and more autono

mous, relative to its material basis. The semiotic dimension of a system is always grounded in the organisation of its constituent material components, and cannot exist without this grounding, but evolution has, supported by the constant energy influx from the sun, tended to create more and more sophisticated semiotic inter

actions which were less and less constrained by the laws of the

56 Hoffmeyer 1992: 108-111.

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material world from which they are ultimately derived.³⁷The com binatorial advantage of the digital code is a certain degree of freedom of constraint from the physical (thus, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text."58).

51 Hoffmeyer 1992, 1996a, J1997.

"s Hoffmeyer, Emmeche 1991: 134.

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A BRIEF BIOSEMIOTIC GLOSSARY

Jesper Hoffmeyer has pointed to a general trend of moving from analog communication to digital."⁹A similar trend is characteristic to scientific knowledge that goes from good (analog) intuitions to

wards precise (digital) definitions. Hoffmeyer has usually not given very exact definitions of the concepts he is using. However, at a certain point of the development of the field certain more formal explications unavoidably must take place.

According to our knowledge, the only published biosemiotic glossary until now has been the one compiled by Thure von Uex

kiill (1982) specifically for the translation of Jakob von Uexküll's Bedeutungslehre. In biological dictionaries, few semiotic terms have been included only very occasionally. In semiotic dictionaries one can find them more often, particularly in these compiled or edited by T. A. Sebeok, or published in recent years (Bouissac, Cobley, Nöth). Due to the youth of biosemiotics, of course, such a situation is understandable. However, there already exists a number of specific terms that one has to learn when reading biosemiotic literature. Jakob von Uexkiill, Thomas A. Sebeok, and Jesper Hoff

meyer have been the main figures enriching our language in this respect.

But there is one more aspect to note. Since semiotics has been developed for a long time with only a marginal concern for bio

logical sign systems, the existing definitions of semiotic terms do not take the latter seriously into account. Now, when a large part of semiotics community has accepted the lowering of semiotic threshold, many of the existing definitions need to be correspon-

E.g., in Hoffmeyer 2000b: 183-184.

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26 A brief biosemiotic glossary

dingly modified. In biology, the situation is even more dramatic.

The semiotic view on living systems infers an altering or deviation of many basic biological notions, or introduction of new ones (fortunately, the 'spontaneous semiotics'⁶⁰of the scientists in bio logy is making this task easier). That is why a biosemiotic glossary needs to include, in addition to the specific terms, also some general ones from both of these fields of knowledge.

The very brief list of terms below is just to mark a step in this endless work — with a special emphasis on the Hoffmeyerian contributions to biosemiotics.

adaptation — an element of an ecological code involving semiotic coherence between organism, umwelt, and ecosystem; also: the process of originating such a code

agency — the ability of an organism to act in order to fulfill needs;

may be defined as a "stable integration of self-reference and other-reference'"⁶¹

biology — study of living systems

biosemiotics — theory of semiosis in living systems; biology that interprets living systems as signs systems; the study of biological codes⁶²

biosphere — the interconnected web of all living systems on the Earth

Baldwin effect — the phenomenon of an influence upon (e.g., enhancement of) biological evolution through individual learning (via other mechanisms than the inheritance of acquired characters) categorization — the process of formation of digital from analogical

in living systems; the process of distinguishing between sub classes in a class of phenomena by formation of borderlines, enhancing distinguishing capability across borders and lowering such capability within categories; discretization of continuous variability as a result of functional cycle

60 An expression used by C. Emmeche (1999: 273).

61 Hoffineyer 2000a, see also 1999b: 156.

62 The latter definition is taken from Sebeok 2001: 164.

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code — a general, conventional, or habit-based correspondence between the elements in one domain and the elements in another;

an arbitrary correspondence

code duality — the two sets of informational modes present in all living systems — one analogical and implicit (e.g. cell structure and metabolism), the other digital and explicit (e.g., gene se quence); language possesses a similar duality between analogical meaning and digital expression

Crick's postulate, or the Central Dogma of molecular biology — a postulate about the directionality of transfer of sequence infor

mation in the cell; holds that such (structural) information cannot be transferred from proteins to DNA; this postulate states nothing about other kinds of sign processes

cytosemiotics — semiotics of cellular processes

degrees of subjectivity — if subjectivity appears during the course of evolution, we should expect it to occur in more and less developed forms, probably along an axis from agency and intentionality to consciousness and self-awareness

ecosemiotics — semiotic analysis of nature in culture; or of the relations between natural and cultural processes

ecosystem — a partly bounded spatio-temperal unit of all inter connected organisms within it, including a closed element cycle due to the functioning of organisms of different trophic levels; this interconnectedness is mediated both via material and semiotic processes

endosemiosis — trains of sign transmission inside the organism⁶³ endosemiotic codes — intraorganismic codes, e.g., genetic code,

metabolic code, immune code, neural code

endosemiotics — study of intraorganismic sign systems

evolution — irreversible change on various levels of organization of the populations of organisms within a lineage in the sequence of generations

exosemiotics — study of interorganismic sign systems.

function — a part of a living system which plays a role in relation to other parts of the system (e.g., the organism), and thus are relatio-

63 Sebeok 2001: 164.

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nally determined by the part-whole relationship, and thus have significance for the whole

functional cycle — a circular process of recognition and action going on between inside and outside of an organism; the concept {Funktionskreis) was introduced by J. v. Uexkiill

genetic code — a correspondence between the (64 possible) nucleo tide triplets of mRNA and the (20 possible) different kinds of aminoacids in a protein; this correspondence being used in protein synthesis in cells; over a dozen slightly different genetic codes are known in different contemporary organisms, among them two different in human cells (one in nucleus, other in mitochondria) habit — an acquired feature or behaviour in a living system which

tends to repeat itself

icon — a sign that refers to its object by virtue of a direct similarity;

also used as predicative (iconic aspect) of other sign types information — a difference that (acting as a sign and thus) makes a

difference (the interprétant) to some agent, organism or part of the organism (the interpreter); this difference may actually or poten

tially signify another object, and thus, simply be a sign; (as, e.g., the non-expressed genes, 'silent' sequences of DNA (such as pseudogenes), may only potentially have significance for the organism or lineage)

immune code — the correspondence between the antibodies and the pattern of organic structures of the organism, thus making an organism capable to distinguish self from non-self

index — a sign that refers to its object by virtue of a direct physical contact (or another form of a physical relation, or causal relation ship) between sign vehicle and object; an index may have iconic aspects as well

inner outside — the representation of certain environmental features inside an organism by various means (chemical or neural percep tion, genetic representation, etc.); (see also outer inside)

inside!outside — the distinction that is made possible by a closed boundary (e.g., membrane)

language — a sign system capable to form sentences (or co-ordinate speech acts); a sign system which includes syntactic signs

macroevolution — evolution above population level

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memory — a system that can be used for storing information, which still can forget it

microevolution — evolution below species level

microsemiosis — semiosis on the level of a single cell, and below mimicry — a three-part system in which some features of an

organism (mimic) are similar to some other (model), thus causing perceptual misinterpretation by a third (dupe)

mycosemiotics — semiotics of fungi

natural history of signs — evolution of the sign systems (assuming that biology entails semiosis, we should expect evolution to display the emergence of still more complicated sign types) organism — a functional spatio-temporal whole that lives, and con

sists minimally of one single cell, or of a coherent swarm of cells other-reference — the organism's different inner representations of

its umwelt

outer inside — the semiotic niche as informed and changed by the inside needs of the organism pertaining to that niche

phytosemiotics — semiotics of plants

scaffolding — an entity or process which supports another, primary process and thus enhances the stability, functioning, or space of possibilities of the latter; especially relevant is semiotic scaf

folding by means of signs; genes may be seen as a scaffolding in relation to heredity; membranes in relation to the autocatalytic cycles of metabolites, language in relation to thought, written language in relation to spoken

self-reference — the necessary (genetical) self-description of a stable living (see other-reference)

semiochemistry — study on signal chemicals semiosic — related to semiosis (cf. semiotic)

semiosis — a sign process; the creation, action, and interpretation of signs (often used synomynously with communication, though the latter is a less general concept)

semiosphere — the global sphere of signs and communication — coextensive to biosphere

semiotic — related to semiotics (cf. semiosic)

semiotic freedom — multiplicity of choice possibilities involved in a sign (due to its categorization and belonging to a sign system)

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semiotic niche — the umwelt of an organism as defined by those semiotic interactions it may entertain within it

semiotic threshold the boundary between non-semiotic area and semiotic area; other thresholds may be envisaged between simpler and more complex sign types in the natural history of signs (e.g., between the systems of symbolic signs and non-symbolic signs) semiotics — study of signs and sign systems; theory of signs; theory

of communication and signification

sign — something (e.g., an entity like a molecule or a process like a change in concentration) which stands for something else (e.g., a nutrient source) to somebody (e.g., a cell, or a component of a cell or an organism, or some bigger living system); the sign is an irreducible triadic relation between all three components (sign carrier, signified object, and interprétant)

sign system — semiotic system (a more general concept than language) subject — a philosophical term typically involving both agency,

intentionality, consciousness, and self-awareness; talking about degrees of subjectivity, not all these features need to be present in primitive subject cases

symbiosis — reciprocally supportive (useful) relationship between organisms or populations; a 'plus-plus' relationship (as different from 'minus-minus' relationship which is called competition); a symbiosis which is obligatory for both partners is called mutualism symbol — a sign that refers to its object by virtue of a general (rule- or law-based) habit, or by virtue of a convention; a symbol may include iconic and indexical aspects as well

swarm — a large group of communicatively interrelated organisms, or cells or other living bio-entities, such as groups of neurons in the brain or body; the concept encompasses social animal groups on the one hand, and multicellular organisms on the other

umwelt — the subjective world of an organism; the concept has been introduced by J. v. Uexküll, remains untranslated in English text (plural: umweiten)

zoosemiotics — semiotics of animal communication; or, the study of the communicative behaviour of animals that do not have language⁶⁴

64 Deely 2001: 154.

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PROPRIOCEPTION

⁶⁵

by Jesper Hoffmeyer

Are mice conscious? Or spiders? Do mosquito larvae possess a form of consciousness? Most people will answer no to the last two questions, but perhaps many will be ready to say yes to the first.

How can we really know the right answer?

It must be admitted that we can't, and we may even never come to know. Because consciousness is not really a decent subject for discussion. Through many years it was a no-word, a word you simply did not bring up in the good scientific community. And even though it has come into favour as a subject of inquiry in the 1990s, with its own distinct professional journals and conferences, it is far from clear what the word signifies. Indeed, many of the most diligent discussants don't think the term refers to any genuine reality.

But this very indefiniteness may provide a key to the pheno menon. If you are the kind of person who thinks that consciousness belongs to human beings, in the same way that light belongs to day, it is tempting to conclude that consciousness is simply the blind spot of natural science, the very thing that this variety of science cannot come to observe.

When I say consciousness is not a decent subject, I mean that consciousness is a phenomenon that can only be known from within. You have to have a consciousness of your own to know the sort of stuff it is. It is as if an objective description of conscious

63 This piece has appeared in Danish in Hoffmeyer (D2001a: 75-80). Translated by Claus Emmeche and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.

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32 Proprioception

ness is not possible, because this kind of description misses something essential, namely that consciousness is always expe

rienced by somebody, a subject. Natural science is about pheno

mena that can be described in the third person singular, that is, by words like "this" and "it", but it cannot in principle investigate the first person singular, that is, the "I".

Even though natural science cannot deal with consciousness as such, it is possible by way of science to try to understand what is needed in order for a system to have consciousness. And if you believe that, minimally, a body with a certain complexity of its brain is needed for the body to be labelled conscious, you can begin to consider how such a brain may be able to bring forth this strange phenomenon. And finally you can attempt to find the evolutionary origin of consciousness in organisms that perhaps are too primitive really to have consciousness, but nevertheless may be thought of as having some non-conscious experiences, a sensi

tivity, or a susceptibility to impressions.

These and many more questions form the topic of an exciting journal called Journal of Consciousness Studies. In one of the more thought-provoking articles (in vol. 5, no. 3) the American philo

sopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone examines the natural history of consciousness.

Her basic idea is that consciousness is deeply connected to movement. It is no accident that animals have brains and plants don't. Plants do not have to move, thus they do not have the problem that forced primitive animals a long time ago to evolve the nervous system. Movement demands that muscle cells at one cor

ner of the organism instantaneously, that is, in microseconds, coor

dinate their activity with muscle cells at the other end. To achieve this coordination — from the perspective of a single cell — long distance communication became the very art of nerve cells.

But movement has an inner side which, according to Sheets- Johnstone, deliver the key to our problem. This is so because movement is also sensation, it presupposes that the body consis tently registers its own change. When we move, we obviously observe that the surroundings are changing, but at the same time,

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Proprioception 33

we feel the movement inside our body. Otherwise we could not direct it — or enjoy it, as when small kids are running, or grown

ups are dancing.

This inner sensation is called proprioception and is due to millions of small sensory cells, devised to measure the pressures and tensions that are produced when the layers of cells inside the body are displaced and sheared against one another. "The astoundingly varied and intricately detailed biological faculty that allows knowing one's own body and body movement and that in the most basic sense allows knowing the world is a dimension of consciousness" writes Sheets-Johnstone.66 Corporeal conscious

ness she calls it:

"Consciousness is thus not in matter; it is a dimension of living forms, in particular, a dimension of living forms that move".⁶⁷

In his book A Leg to Stand On (1984) the American medical doctor Oliver Sacks described his personal experience of what it was like when the proprioceptive sense disappears. He had been injured in one of his legs and had lost the nerve connection to that leg's inner sensory cells.

"Clearly I had a leg that looked completely perfect anatomically [...] but it felt uneasily strange and even looked so — a lifeless copy attached to my body" he writes: "One has oneself, one is one's self, because the body knows itself and affirms itself by this sixth sense" (i.e., proprioception).

It is also well-known that you cannot control your gait only by vision. And even so simple a movement like stretching the arm out for a cup of coffee in fact demands continuous adjustment via proprioceptive sense impressions. Otherwise the movement cannot be performed smoothly. It has been discovered that such proprio ceptive guidance is not due to a simple feed-back mechanism.

Instead, the movement is guided by an internal model, that is being constantly updated by the inputs from the proprioceptive senses.

66 Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 275.

67 Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 276.

5

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34 Proprioception

The reason why a simple feed-back isn t good enough is that the proprioceptive signals from arms and legs are too slow to reach the brain in due time to guide the movement. American robot scientist Andy Clark has suggested that the body might solve the problem in a way similar to the solution given by the robot builders, namely by introducing a sort of pseudo-orchestral con ductor (in computer lingo, a motor emulator). This pseudo-con

ductor "models characteristic aspects of the agent's bodily dyna

mics and may even be used in the absence of usual sensory input"

writes Clark. Obviously, the pseudo-conductor has to be perpe

tually updated with proprioceptive data to be able to remit a virtual feed-back that simulates the kinetic reality.

I don't know how the reader feels about this, but for me a bell rings. If you match Clark's idea with Sheets-Johnstone's idea, it seems likely that this internal model, the pseudo-conductor, constitutes the very primordial basis of consciousness. We should imagine that when animals in the course of evolution developed the conglomerates of nerve cells we call brains, there emerged, little by little, the capacity for making the kind of internal models I have called pseudo-conductors.

That consciousness basically is a kind of virtual reality may not sound like hot news, but it seems far more easy to grasp as we have become used to the virtual reality of the computer. A pseudo- conductor is not in itself a consciousness. But it has the same strange mixture of dependence upon, and autonomy in relation to, the external world, as exhibited by our human consciousness.

The autonomy of the pseudo-conductor is indeed very, very poor as compared to consciousness, but everything starts in small ways.

Pseudo-conductors resemble consciousness by having emanci

pated themselves from time, though only in tiny fractions of a second. But obviously they lack that special integration of senses and recollections that presumably bring about our experiencing a virtual reality. Stated differently, they lack that little detail that an

"I" presupposes: namely, duration as well as unity. We are (nor

mally) only one "I", and this one "I" has a tendency to endure in one time slice after the other.

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ON BIOGRAPHY

Let us provide, without attempting any completeness by this brief biographical sketch, a little background information about the person who, in our opinion, has contributed so fruitfully to the potentials for a profound re-orientation of biological thinking.

First, the hard facts — pace his own critique of this very notion.

Jesper Hoffmeyer was born in Denmark on February 21st, 1942.

He lives in Hundested, a small Danish city on the northern coast of Zealand. He works as a researcher and teacher at the University of Copenhagen.

Jesper Hoffmeyer was born into a family with strong anti- conservative and atheist traditions. His father, the medical doctor Svend Hoffmeyer (1866-1951) was active in the Danish social movement of sexual reform. During his formative years, Jesper became influenced, through his family, by the strong intellectual movement of 'cultural leftism' [in Danish: 'kulturradikalisme']. It was led by a society called 'liberal struggle for culture' [Frisindet Kulturkamp], questioning the ideals of 'God, King, and Country'.

His father was one of the initiators of their journal Kulturkampen ^%. Of his two half brothers, Jorgen Hoffmeyer is a retired lawyer, and Henrik Hoffmeyer (1917-1986) was a psychiatrist, who played a central role in paving the way for introducing the law of free abortion in Denmark in 1973. Jespers mother, Astrid Hoffmeyer (1907-1994), was a librarian and became highly respected for her efforts as a head of the city library in Hillerod to make the library a real cultural centre of the town. His full brother, Klaus Hoffmeyer

68 May be translated as 'Struggle for Kulture' or 'Struggling about Culture' (in German: Kulturkampf).

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36 On biography

(born 1938), worked as a theater and television director and is now chief of actors at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. Continuing with the vertical dimension of biosemiosis, Jesper s three sons are Kasper Hoffmeyer aged 35, Johannes Hoffmeyer Malmros aged 27 and Max Moller Hoffmeyer aged 12. With the arrival of little Frida, the daughter of Johannes and Sophie, Jesper has just become a grandparent.

Jesper Hoffmeyer received his Master degree [cand. scient.] in biochemistry from the University of Copenhagen in 1967. He attained a science fellowship that brought him to the biochemical institute (Institut de Biochimie générale et comparé) of Collège de France, in Paris, in 1967-1968. There, besides doing research on basic aspects of bacterial metabolism, he naturally acquired a first hand experience of the students' anti-autoritarian revolt in May 1968. Back in Copenhagen, he joined the general move to over

throw the closed traditional professorial power of the universities and install a more open and democratic decision-making system.

He received a temporary teaching and research position [amanuen

sis] at the Biochemistry Department [Institut for Biologisk Kemi B] at the University of Copenhagen in 1968, where he has held a permanent position as associate professor [lektor] since 1972.

This department, also called 'The Enzyme Division' [Enzymaf- delingen] was led by professor Agnete Munch-Petersen, and focused on studying the regulated metabolism of nucleosides and nucleotides — vital components of the cell's DNA — using the bacterium Escherichia coli and other microorganisms as model organisms. Jesper's colleagues, together with a handful of other contemporary associate professors and a group of Ph.D. and Master students, have led a very active research unit at the univer

sity since the 1970s.

Biochemical research is usually described as extremely compe

titive, sometimes even with a tendency to create a narrow-minded intellectual milieu allowing to deal with only a single research topic within a department, and one might have expected problems when Jesper Hoffmeyer gradually got involved in other issues during the 1970s. Some of these were about university politics — he was a member of the supreme governing body of the university

rethinking Reading

LipiomK îj

Claus Emmeche Kalevi Kull

Frederik Stjernfelt

Reading Hoffmeyer, rethinking biology

TARTU SEMIOTICS LIBRARY 3

Hoffmeyerit lugedes, bioloogiat ümber sõnastades Читая Хоффмейера, переосмысливая биологию

Laes Hoffmeyer — nytaenk biologien

Reading Hoffmeyer, rethinking biology

PRESS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Entering a semiotic landscape

A BIOSEMIOTIC BUILDING: 13 THESES

A BRIEF BIOSEMIOTIC GLOSSARY

PROPRIOCEPTION

ON BIOGRAPHY